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  • Published: 15 September 2016
  • ISBN: 9781473523425
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

Judas




Amos Oz's first major novel in a decade – since A Tale of Love and Darkness, which sold over 2 million copies worldwide

The Israeli master’s exceptional final novel

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2017

Shmuel – a young, idealistic student – has abandoned his studies in Jerusalem, taking a live-in job as a companion to a cantankerous old man. But Shmuel quickly becomes obsessed with the taciturn Atalia, a woman of enchanting beauty, who also lives in the house.

As the household’s tangled, tragic past becomes apparent, so too does story behind the birth of the state of Israel. Journeying back into the deep past, Judas is a love story like no other by a master storyteller at the height of his powers.


‘A hero of mine, a moral as well as literary giant’ Simon Schama

‘One of his boldest works of all’ Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times
‘Amos Oz…brought so much beauty, so much love, and a vision of peace to our lives. Please hold him in your hearts and read his books’ Natalie Portman

Judas is the first novel selected for the Amos Oz reading circle established by Natalie Portman.

  • Published: 15 September 2016
  • ISBN: 9781473523425
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

About the author

Amos Oz

Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz was the internationally acclaimed author of many novels and essay collections, translated into over forty languages, including his brilliant semi-autobiographical work, A Tale of Love and Darkness. His last novel, Judas, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017 and won the Yasnaya Polyana Foreign Fiction Award. He received several international awards, including the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize, the Goethe Prize, the Frankfurt Peace Prize and the 2013 Franz Kafka Prize. He died in December 2018.

Also by Amos Oz

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Praise for Judas

A masterpiece: command of the word, mastery of construct, the ability to stimulate all the senses of the reader.

La Reppublica

Judas is a rich and thrilling novel, one of the most interesting books published this year.

Haaretz

Amos Oz belongs to the great authors of world literature

Suddeutsche Zeitung

Judas is deeply humane, touching and loving. Incredible literature

TROUW

Once again, Amos Oz has given us an absolute, necessary masterpiece

Alberto Manguel

Judas is a great novel that only Oz could have written…perhaps his finest work.

Standpoint

Judas is many-layered, thought-provoking and – in its love story – delicate as a chrysalis, this is an old-fashioned novel of ideas that is strikingly and compellingly modern.

Peter Stanford, Observer

This book is compassionate as well as painfully provocative, a contribution to some sort of deeper listening to the dissonances emerging from deep within the politics and theology of Israel and Palestine.

Rowan Williams, New Statesman

A very absorbing addition to his remarkable oeuvre

Andrew Motion, Guardian

challenging, complex and strangely compelling… The ideas at the novel’s centre have great vitality and force. The philosophical passages bristle with linguistic energy, scriptural references and dense detail, vividly conveyed in Nicholas de Lange’s translation.

Eva Hoffman, Spectator

He’ll no doubt be overlooked for the Nobel Prize yet again next month – this novel shows just how ludicrous that is.

Hephzibah Anderson, Mail on Sunday

It is rich in material to grapple with. Oz engages with urgent questions while retaining his right as a novelist to fight shy of answers: it’s a mark of his achievement that the result isn’t frustrating but tantalising.

Anthony Cummins, Daily Telegraph

After almost two dozen books that track changes in both heart and state with untiring strength and subtlety, the Israeli master has delivered one of the boldest of all his works… Nicholas de Lange, Oz’s distinguished translator, steers these virtuoso transitions between debate and domesticity with unerring skill… Oz can imagine, and inhabit, treachery of every stripe. But he keeps faith with the art of fiction.

Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times

A big, beautiful novel… Funny, wise and provoking.

Kate Saunders, The Times

[Judas is] quietly provocative… Aided by Nicholas de Lange’s lucid translation from the Hebrew, it challenges you to think afresh about stories and histories whose interpretations can seem chiseled in stone.

Wall Street Journal (Europe)

Utterly spellbinding ... an especially urgent and profoundly universal work ...Judas is a stately but thoroughly entertaining work, brimming with intricate storylines and characters who are brilliantly alive and get under one's skin. Oz has written one of the most triumphant novels of his career

Ranen Omer-Sherman, Forward

A heart-breaking meditation on roads not taken, and collisions yet to come.

Clive Sinclair, Times Literary Supplement, Book of the Year

It is a tribute to the author’s gifts (and to those of his long-time translator Nicholas de Lange) that the novel is so fluid and evocative, at once intellectually stimulating and brimming with humanity… [Oz’s] empathy for human weakness, which has always marked his writing, saturates this extraordinary, rich novel.

Natasha Lehrer, Times Literary Supplement

Judas deepens the reader’s understanding of conflicts that arguably seem more irresolvable today than they did in 1960… In Lange’s lively translation, the sense of place and period is powerful.

Max Liu

Oz has written so well for so long, the craft shows. Judas reads quickly, and gracefully, without a superfluous page.

Ben Judah, Prospect

Vintage Oz, very atmospheric, and heavy on authentic detail… Enjoy reading the book, and then enjoy peeling back the layers.

Max Blackston, Birmingham Jewish Record

Regarded as a potential Nobel laureate… Oz is always worth heeding. It is an important work and as ever Oz’s translator Nicholas de Lange attends to the power, intensity and nuance Oz brings to every idea.

Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

Judas is yet another accomplished work by a master comfortable in his game… accessibly profound as well as deeply thought-provoking. A must for anyone interested in Christianity, politics, and the meaning of friendship. Otherwise, Judas is a great way to meet one of the most important writers in the 21st century at his best.

Yoojung Chun, Oxford Student

A novel that grapples with mankind’s most indelible anxieties, from the nature of damnation to the smaller but no less urgent details of tea-making, Judas is an intelligent and hypnotic novel.

Brad Davies, Independent